In the second place, the church hymn should be suitable for use in the congregation, it should possess a congregational character. This quality of the church hymn implies, of course, that it must not contain anything which is at variance with the confession or the doctrines of the Church. The Lutheran Church may use hymns that have been written by non-Lutheran hymn writers, provided these hymns contain nothing offensive to sound Lutheran doctrine. So Lutheran hymnals may contain hymns taken from the Reformed Churches, and Reformed church hymnals may contain many Lutheran hymns. The congregational element in the Lutheran church hymn further means that it must be free from all unsound and unjustifiable subjectivity. The church hymn is the work of a poet who is vitally united with the religious organism—he is a member of the Church—and from this consciousness of perfect communion his hymns emerge. Writes Dr. Martin Luther: “Church hymns are so called, because the Church has accepted them and uses them as if produced by the Church and as her own hymns. We do not say: thus sings Ambrose, Gregory the Great, Prudentius, Sedulius; but we say: thus sings the Christian Church. It is the songs of the Church that Ambrose, Prudentius and others sing with the Church and the Church with them; when they are dead and gone, the Church remains, and continues to sing their songs.” Personal poetic gifts and temporal conditions and circumstances influence the church hymns. The true church hymn does not lack individuality; but it is free from individualism. The experiences which the church hymn expresses, the soul states which it describes, should not be of an extreme, a singular or an abnormal character, but they should be normal and common to the Church. Not that the church hymn must restrict itself to what every member, in whatsoever condition of spiritual life, would readily subscribe to. Such a requirement would be unreasonable, because the participants in divine worship have reached different stages of spiritual development; in fact, this would restrict the subject matter of the church hymn to only certain general facts and abstract ideas. But it must be required of every church hymn that it express only such religious experiences as are _in the main_ common to the whole communion of the faithful, only such soul states and spiritual stages of development as are _essentially_ experienced by every true Christian.